Best Chocolate Milk (2010)

As much as our daydreams may run toward the coffee milk you find in Rhode Island and the root-beer milk popular in the greater Wichita area, we have nothing against chocolate milk, really we don't. The sticky concoctions in most supermarket dairy cases don't do much for us, but we remember fondly Alta Dena's brief flirtation with Guittard, and we are always happy to see the thick glass bottles of chocolate milk from Broguiere's. The chocolate milk at the diner Milk up on Beverly Boulevard? Not so bad! Yet the urge for the ambrosial, cocoa-colored fluid is always at its peak when we drive up to the teetering Norwalk Dairy, one of the last remaining dairy farms in a part of the county that used to be thick with them, and peek in at the contented-looking cows that live in back of the stand. The milk here may not be flavored with fancy chocolate, and this corner of a Santa Fe Springs industrial area is not the scenery that shows up in the dairy-board commercials, but the chocolate milk is rich, gently flavored and first-rate. If all of this is too wholesome for you, the dairy is next door to the excellent Thai restaurant Renu Nakorn, where you can blow the top of your head off with an order of catfish larb. 13101 Rosecrans Ave., Santa Fe Springs. (562) 921-5712. Jonathan Gold